I Had Barely Finished Holding My Son’s Newborn Baby When a Nurse Pulled Me Aside and Whispered, “That Isn’t the Child He Left With”

If someone asks, I answer.

If not, the photographs simply exist.

That is remembrance without performance.

The white roses became another thing outsiders romanticized.

“Two angel bushes.”

I stopped correcting everyone unless it mattered.

In our family, they are simply two rosebushes planted after Lily and Leo died.

One died.